Hi everyone! This is Jenny & Alex here. We relocated to Detroit in 2013 after living in Asia for 5 years. Alex is originally from California and Jenny is from Hong Kong. We met each other in Germany through an internship and we later fell in love in a hostel in Spain while traveling together. Alex has a background in tech start-ups in NYC and California while Jenny worked in marketing for L'Oreal in Hong Kong & Germany.

We LOVE to travel and have lived and adventured throughout Europe and Asia extensively. In 2013 we decided to move back to the US (thought we would be in California) and we heard about the bankruptcy in Detroit. As any open-minded traveller knows, a good place can often be distorted by the media so we decided to do a road trip to see the city for ourselves. After driving into Detroit we fell in love with the city! People here have a lot of pride and heart. There is a spirit of resilience and you can feel the energy as the city rebuilds. We also see that the city has a lot of opportunities for individuals to grow and make a difference so we hope you will consider joining us on our adventure!

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Since moving to Detroit in 2013 we’ve been fixing up old houses and hosting travelers from around the world. Fast forward a year, after gaining the experience of fixing up 3 houses and hosting hundreds of travellers, we decided to start a BIKE & BED lodge for health conscious travelers and digital nomads. We want to provide a deep travel experience that brings positive social change. Having a positive impact on our society and hosting new travelers have always been dreams of ours and now we are doing just that! We bought our place at the end of last year, an abandoned >7000 sq ft convalescent home built in the 1930's and we are in the process of bringing the place back to life.

We are now looking for people who can help us with daily maintenance, cleaning, and various types of renovation work. If you think you're interested in helping and you want to experience a classic American city that is going through an exciting rebirth - please get in touch!

Teach, Learn, Share

We are very confident that we can provide a great cultural exchange and learning opportunity for the right candidates if he/ she is looking for:

- Superb Guidance: As someone who went through an internship program ourselves (in fact this is how we met in the first place :) ), we were there before and know how to create a meaningful experience for the right candidate. We are also well versed in both the start-up and corporate worlds which means we can offer perspectives on both. (I personally wish I had someone to guide me between those 2 worlds when I was right out of college.)

- Cultural and Language Exchange: We have guests coming from around the world that we would share ideas and meals together. Staying with us would mean you will be part of it! Jenny is an avid language learner (fluent in 4 languages, speak 6 and right now self-learning Spanish) and Alex is a native English speaker with West Coast accent. If you would like to improve your English or pick up some new languages, we are very happy to help.

- A Taste of Entrepreneurship and Learning How to Lead in a Diverse Culture: Hospitality, especially during our build-up phase, is a business that has both the planning and analysis component but also the ‘physical’ component. Being with us means not only will you know what it takes to build a business, but you will interact with guest from around the world, and work with people from diverse socio-economic and technical backgrounds, making the volunteer a much more well rounded individual.

- An Alternative to the Classic Corporate Opportunity: I still remember vividly the struggle between tapping into the corporate world versus starting something on my own. This will be a great experience for someone who wants to experience what it takes to start something (and the satisfaction that comes with it :) ) before trying out a classic corporate job or someone who wants a break from the corporate world.

- To understand a fascinating city and possibly identify his/her own opportunity: Detroit is undergoing so much improvement and it’s an amazing city to be in right now. Since we’ve started hosting, we have guests from around the world who have come here for a conference or a field trip and have fallen in love with the city and eventually decided to buy a house, fix it up and "start" their life here! It’s an exciting time to be here in Detroit and who knows? Maybe you would want to start something here too!

- A Fun Place to Work: Want to meet cool travelers from around the world?! Detroit is becoming an interesting place with a growing diversity. The Movement festival and the International Jazz Festival are big hits. But throughout the year, we have been hosting a lot of people from Europe, particularly Germans and French, and Australians. A lot of them can see the similarity of Detroit to East Berlin after the wall came down so people find it fascinating to see it here now before things change (and things are changing very quickly indeed).